US Patent 7899927 Multiple concurrent arbiters

Plural arbiters arbitrate over a set of queues. The arbiters are constructed as a series of pipelined stages. Conflict detection logic detects conflicts among the arbiters in arbitrating across the queues, and, when a conflict is detected, the conflict detection logic alters processing related to conflicting queues in one arbiter when another arbiter has not passed a predetermined commit point in processing the queue.